


3 AM

by QueenMae_theGay



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-10-10 08:12:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17422184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenMae_theGay/pseuds/QueenMae_theGay
Summary: After Season 7; an alt. in which Voltron stayed on Earth to rebuild.





	3 AM

"She says it's cold outside and she hands me my raincoat  
She's always worried about things like that  
She says it's all gonna end and it might as well be my fault"

His voice was low, too full of too many different emotions. 

***

Lance heard him from very far away at first. It was so early in the morning that he hadn’t expected anyone else to be up yet. The Galra were off of Earth, and things were being rebuilt, but Voltron still lived in close proximity in the Galaxy Garrison. They had gone home to their families for the first few weeks but they were too far from the only people who really understood their PTSD. 

After Keith had nearly killed a well-meaning nurse at the hospital; after Lance had screamed so loudly in his sleep that it had woken up his whole family; after Hunk had started shaking so badly he couldn’t move when he entered his childhood kitchen; after Pidge couldn’t sleep through the night without the comforting purrs of Green, they had all moved back together. 

It happened gradually - Shiro brought Keith home to his new little apartment, and he had just stayed, even after Krolia and Kolivan set up their headquarters elsewhere. 

Then one night, Cosmo had disappeared from Keith’s side. He reappeared moments later with a shaking, crying Lance. 

Neither of them had ever figured out how the wolf had known to get Lance. 

But only the truly broken posture of the Red-ish paladin kept Keith from storming into the bedrooms of every other member of Voltron to demand why the everlasting fuck he had never been told Lance had literally DIED for Christ’s sake. 

But Lance had been crying and shaking and couldn’t even speak for the first hour he was there. And then when he regained his voice, he made eye contact with Keith and whispered, “Please don’t go.”

It took hours to get his tears to stop, and hours on top of that for Keith to learn that Lance had been dreaming of dying over and over again for months. 

He was livid. But he didn’t show an ounce of his anger until the next morning when he ever-so-politely asked Allura for a moment of her time. 

And he invited the rest of the team along too because he had a quick question for them all. 

So they sat down around a table, not expecting much. 

Keith didn’t sit.

He paced, landing behind Lance, his hands folded protectively over the other boy’s shoulders. 

And when he asked, “Why didn’t anyone tell me that he fucking died?”, his voice was less a question and more a growl that cut off Lance’s it’s-not-important.

That was the first time any of them saw Allura cry. 

Later that night, Lance knocked on Keith’s door and asked him if he could spend the night on his floor. He promised he’d go home in the morning. 

In the morning, Keith commandeered a whole wing of the Garrison, with Iverson’s blessing. 

He made sure Lance’s room had an adjourning door to his. 

Pidge moved in next. 

No one really remembered her moving in, her stuff just appeared one day. 

No one really questioned it either. 

Slowly, one by one, they filtered in. Hunk spent his time pretty much equally between his family and Voltron. 

Lance still had a room at home but rarely if ever slept there. 

Pidge’s whole family lived in the Garrison anyway, but only Matt lived in the same wing. 

Allura, Romelle, and Coran pretty much never left the Garrison in the early months anyway. 

And once Lance moved in, and once Shiro decided to stay, well, Keith wasn’t going to leave his family. 

***

They all lived in close proximity. It wasn’t unusual to hear someone moving around in the night, whether from insomnia or anxiety, or both. They liked it better that way, though. It was a reminder that they had all survived - that they were all real. 

Lance had woken up. Again. And while he hadn’t wanted to disturb anyone (even though they often had midnight therapy sleepovers), there was someone… singing?  
He smiled briefly, the movement foreign on his face. He knew the song, although he hadn’t heard it in what felt like forever.

It was too slow and soft for his taste - he liked what he jokingly referred to as bad emo music. The kind of music he always assumed Keith liked. 

"And she only sleeps when it's raining  
And she screams, and her voice is straining

 

And she says, baby,  
It's three a.m. I must be lonely"

But there it was again - low and soft - like the singer was trying to soothe themselves to sleep. 

Unsuccessfully, apparently. 

But whoever it was was singing like they truly were lonely, like it was the end of their world. 

It broke Lance’s heart just the tiniest bit - because he knew that voice. 

He knew that voice as the voice that could make him smile no matter what. As the voice that reminded him of his worth. He knew that voice as supportive but not pushy, kind but not overwhelming. 

He knew that voice because he had been in love with that voice for years. 

So laying in the dark, listening to Keith sing quietly, Lance couldn’t help but cry just the littlest bit. 

Because while he had always counted on Keith to listen to and help him through all of his shit, he realized he never really followed up with Keith. Not any more than the rest of the team, anyway. 

Lance lay in bed in the silence of the night, laying on his stomach with his head pointing towards the interior door. 

The interior door Keith had told him was always open if he needed anything. 

The interior door he fell asleep looking at almost every night, wishing he had the courage to open. 

But he never did, because he was afraid of Keith. Afraid that beneath all the protective anger and kindness and welcoming comments, beneath all the banter between them, Keith really did hate him.

Because really, who wouldn’t?

***  
"When she says baby  
Well I can't help but be scared of it all sometimes  
And the rain's gonna wash away I believe it."

Lance’s head was filled with thoughts like that one - nasty, prickly, awful thoughts. 

But he lay in the dark, and he closed his eyes. 

And he let the longing, and the fear, and the anger and bitterness in Keith’s low voice roll over him in waves. 

And slowly, he fell asleep. 

Even though he could hardly sleep anymore.

Even though he was a hundred different kinds of fucked up. 

Even though the last thing that should have been on his mind was a silly crush. 

Even though Lance had woken up in a cold sweat, 

He drifted off to sleep. 

Because like it always had, listening to Keith made him feel safe. 

***

A week passed before Lance heard him sing again. 

It was the same song that he woke up to, already soothing his frayed nerves. 

"She's got a little bit of something, god it's better than nothing  
And in her color portrait world she believes that she's got it all  
She swears the moon don't hang quite as high as it used to  
And she only sleeps when it's raining  
And she screams, and her voice is straining"

 

Tonight, Lance couldn’t help himself. Because he had fought and died and done everything he should never have had to do for Earth, and he still couldn’t function well enough to be with his family. Because Keith was singing like it was the last good thing left in the world, and he would never be that good thing for anyone, let alone Keith himself. Because if he couldn’t even sleep through the night, how was he supposed to save the universe?

So he cried, alone in his dark room. 

And just as suddenly as it had started the other night, the soft singing stopped. 

And a door that had never been opened slowly inched out from its frame, a sliver of red-tinted light falling across Lance’s face. His whole body stilled, waiting. 

And waiting. 

***

Keith was terrified. 

He shouldn’t be this scared, but he was because it was Lance, and if it went badly, it could ruin all the trust they’d so slowly and painfully built. 

He slipped into the dark room and sat down on the edge of the bed. 

Silently, Lance rolled over to face him. 

“It’s really dark in here.”

“I can?? Turn on the lights if you want.”

“No, it’s ok. I was just wondering why.”

“The lights in the room are too blue. Too bright.”

And they were silent for a while until Lance said, “When she brought me back, everything glowed blue. I can’t look at blue light anymore.”

Keith felt his heart break for his blue boy, who had been so scarred by his own quintessence that he couldn’t look at his favorite color. 

So he changed the subject because he didn’t know what else to say. 

“I’m sorry if I woke you up.”

“You help, actually. I like… I like listening to you. It’s grounding.”  
His word came slowly like he was worried Keith would be upset by anything he said. 

“Can I lay down?” He could feel Lance nod into the mattress, so he slid under the sheets, curling up on his side. They lay facing each other for a long time. 

They lay in the silence, a shaft of light between their faces, for so long that their breathing synched to each other's.

Neither of them moved for so long that Lance fell asleep, curled tightly on his side. And while he used to sleep like the dead, he managed to roll literally onto Keith within minutes. 

Keith didn’t really mind. He just wrapped an arm around Lance’s shoulders and pulled him against his chest. (And he definitely loved the fact that he was now taller than Lance - and he totally tucked his chin over Lance’s head.)

They were silent for so long that Keith was nearly asleep when Lance said, “You shouldn’t be mad at them. I never told them about dying. I…” His voice broke for a half second, and the taller paladin felt the silent tears against his arm and his chest. 

“I didn’t want to bother them.”

And once again, Keith couldn’t trust his voice. So he just pulled Lance closer to him. When he gathered his thoughts and found the courage to speak, he murmured into the black, “You never bother me, Lance.”

But he was already asleep. 

***

To say Keith slept well would be an understatement. And he woke up to find himself still hugging Lance to his chest. Silently, he slid out of the bed, carefully disentangling himself from Lance. 

He padded back to his room, closing the door behind him. There were still a couple hours before he needed to be awake. He sighed and settled down on his bed, putting in earbuds as his music came on. 

"And she says baby  
It's three a.m. I must be lonely  
Oh, when she says baby  
Well I can't help but be scared of it all sometimes  
And the rain's gonna wash away I believe this."

The song kept playing, picking up just where he’d left it the night before. 

Keith smiled, just a tiny bit, at the memory. He lay back and let himself drift into that comfortable state of not-quite-awake but not-yet-asleep. 

When he rose two hours later, he realized that his day started to go downhill the moment he had let go of Lance. 

There were hundreds upon thousands of fires to put out all over the world, some of them literal. Voltron was needed for its skills, but also for its brute strength - they could lift up rubble in twenty minutes that could take a half dozen lives and months of labor from ground crews. 

So Keith worked, and he led, and he went through the motions of his job. But for the most part, they were just motions. 

Falling asleep next to Lance had made him realize that he had fallen in love just as easily as he had fallen into Shiro’s role as leader. Just the same way he fell asleep. In fits and starts, slowly at first. 

But now he was still falling, and he realized that this, not being the leader of Voltron, not the thousand other little things he had to worry about, this was the thing that would drive him crazy. 

Because there was almost never a moment in which Lance was not right by his side. 

***  
Talking in the night had become an easy habit. If one of them couldn’t sleep, they would crack open the door. 

When the other woke up, it meant “please come check on me.”

They used this little system a lot. 

Lance learned to read Keith’s moods - when he was isolating, or when he was anxious, or when he got so triggered by some reminder that he could hardly move or speak. 

That last one had nearly sent Lance into a panic attack of his own one night. 

But they were slowly learning to help themselves and to help each other. They were slowly, every so slowly, healing from all the traumas they had been through. Some nights, they talked about deep-seated trauma, about things that still kept them up at night, about the lives they had taken. 

Other nights, they talked about music and flowers and stars. 

Keith, as it turns out, listened almost exclusively to the kind of soft music Lance had never associated with him. 

But it didn’t really matter that Lance had never loved that music, because he loved it when Keith sang, no matter what song he was singing. 

One night, though, when Lance walked into Keith’s room, Keith was sitting in the middle of the bed, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. 

Waiting for Lance?

“Hey,” he greeted softly. 

“Hey.”

Lance settled down on the mattress without asking - this had happened for too many times for him to need to ask. He just sat and leaned his head on Keith’s shoulder. 

“Do you remember when I chose you to escape?’

Lance knew. He remembered. He nodded. 

“You didn’t want to be stuck with me for eternity.”

“Yes and no. I would want to be stuck with you for eternity, more than anything. But it would kill me, because it killed me then and it kills me even more now. To be around you forever as your brother and your leader would be worse than not seeing you ever at all - and nothing would ever make up for me knowing I had the chance to save you and I didn’t take it. Because it hurts, Lance. To be around you so much and still not be able to…”

He had silently and listened, but when Keith’s hands dropped in frustration, his heavy sigh echoing, Lance moved. 

He caught Keith’s hand, holding it in his. And he gave Keith the softest, saddest, most hopeful smile. 

“It’s killing me too, Mullet.”

And then he pulled himself forward, up into Keith’s lap, his hand on the other paladin’s cheek. 

“Can I kiss you?”

Keith, ever the impulsive, didn’t bother to answer. He did, however, lean forward and press a kiss to Lance’s lips. They kissed like it was the beginning of the universe, like everything around them was made of glass. 

They were gentle, and in all honesty, not much changed. 

But now they fell asleep and woke up holding hands. 

Now they said goodnight with tiny kisses and said good morning with little smiles. 

Because they were both broken. 

But they were also both healing.

And it turns out that Keith really would have loved to be stuck with Lance forever. Just… not as his leader. But that was ok. After all, it was their team. 

And Keith really liked the idea of spending forever with his boyfriend. 

*** The End ***


End file.
